A winning e-learning and onboarding concept

The GrandVision Academy is our international center of excellence for continuous learning and development for all employees. It ensures we are able to deliver learning and development programs in a consistent and effective manner. The GV Academy framework applies a blended learning approach which comprises e-learning, classroom lessons and on-the-job trainings. It is empowered by an integrated Learning Management System, which facilitates the sharing of best practices and adapts content to local needs and circumstances. And that is exactly what Apollo, GrandVision’s German retail banner did.

By adapting and transforming GV Academy’s framework to the German market’s needs and requests, Apollo was better able to train and onboard new employees. Apollo was recognized for these efforts and won two prizes at the ‘Didacta’ fair in Hannover, Germany, Europe’s biggest educational fair. In 2017, over 900 of Germany's leading companies took part in various categories related to blended and e-learning approaches. Apollo received one prize for its blended onboarding program for store staff, and another for its micro e-learning program ‘The Sales Expert’.

The aim of Apollo’s new onboarding concept is to introduce new employees in a welcome week to the corporate culture and its values, to provide them with the right contacts and procedures and to prepare them for the work process at an optical store. Through this pretraining and centralized support new employees are well-prepared to start their job at the store and empowered to build stronger relationships with their colleagues. At the same time, the welcome week is very educational while it includes sessions in sales philosophy, optics, Point-Of-Sale (POS) systems, and others. Last but not least, the welcome week classroom training is complemented and deepened by an e-learning program with various courses of GV Academy for the next weeks and months.

Apollo also adapted the e-learning concept of GV Academy to the specific needs of all employees by shortening the learning sessions, thus allowing easier repetition and knowledge refreshing – called ‘micro-learning’. These new short, interactive and entertaining ‘micro units’ proved to be a great success in preparing employees for their work in-store. Not only did they improve the learning experience, they also gave employees a higher degree of self-control and flexibility.

This new onboarding and micro-learning approaches further reinforce Apollo’s corporate culture by strengthening the feeling of mutual trust and personal responsibility. In this way all employees stay motivated and empowered.

“Apollo’s HR team has a unique ability to engage and support the development of new colleagues. Together with the coaches from Metabasis, they continuously update and adapt the content of the online classes so all employees are well-prepared for their in-store work with clients!” states Monika Joos, Lead Coach of Apollo’s trainings partner, Metabasis.